I am too paranoid to install VS2010 Beta 2 on my production machine beside VS2008 without hearing from people who have already took the plunge. I know MS says it's OK, but that does not necessarily mean it will work.
Has anyone successfully installed VS2010 Beta 2 (preferably Ultimate edition) on their production machine with no negative consequences?
If you're that paranoid (and perhaps reasonably so!), have you thought of running it up in a virtual machine ? You can then point it to the same source repository, and be confident that the two won't interfere.
It's working for me; I haven't seen any problems so far (admittedly in, like, one day).
That said, I'd be a lot more cautious if we didn't have a separate build server for our production builds.
Since it's in Beta, I would not install it on a production box; not even in your daily development machine. The best solution is a virtual machine, which is the way I always try beta software.
VS2010 beta 1 worked perfectly alongside VS2005 and VS2008 on two PCs for me. (One XP, one Vista)
It also uninstalled cleanly in both cases.
This is no guarantee of Beta2 working perfectly of course, but you should be ok. Generally the advice is: don't install Beta visual studio releases on development machines - use a virtual PC or a PC you don't mind reinstalling the OS on.
I have installed VS2010 beta 2 in my machine, together with VS2008, and it seems to work fine. There were two compelling reasons for me to start using it right now, both related to Silverlight: unit testing and visual designer.
Take a look at some of the list of known issues in VS 2010 beta 2.
I have installed it to a machine with VS 2008 on it that I don't care about. :) Looking at the "correct" uninstall procedure from that link above makes me think that not putting it on a production box is a good idea... Going from that beta to the next one is going to be a PITA.
And whoever said they are WPF/Winform it won't conflict is crazy. .Net 4 installs side by side, yes. But there are policy files and binding redirects installed for all editions on your box because VS 2010 can also build / debug / test .Net 2/3/3.5 assemblies. You are touching every .Net runtime on your box when you install VS 2010 (like it or not).
I have a parallel install of VS 2008 and VS 2010 beta 2. The only negative consequence is that some Microsoft DLLS (Microsoft.Test...) that is part of the unittest framework on both vs2008 and vs2010 needs to be referenced by version in the vs.net 2008 projects. Otherwise vs2008 may just pick the vs2010 reference by default and you get compilation errors.